Loonfeather: A Campin’ Cruisin’ Boat You Can Backpack
[Reprint from MAIB.]
Let me show you our living room. It’s a place comfortably set up to suit our tastes. We sit in comfortable seating or stretch out and relax, read, eat, sleep play music, (I’m a fiddler and Ruth plays guitar) watch birds, feel the wind, sail watch remote Adirondack forests slip by. Some living room!
This particular living room, Loonfeather, has just enough space for two people to sleep safely and comfortably, sails and rows well, and at forty pounds is easily portagable. Now I personally wouldn’t want to live here for more than a few days, or a week, (although some might) but those few days can be about as close to paradise as us mortals get to get.
Canoes and kayaks are the two choices for wilderness travel. But his boat makes three, with some differences. You don’t just travel in Loonfeather, you live aboard. Two people sail facing forward, with high, comfortable back support side by side so it’s easy to point out birds, pass the video camera, study maps, fix lunch. All your gear is within easy reach, and you can move about, stretch out full length on the deck relax, sunbathe ( if that’s your thing). And, if you want, you sleep aboard. (It’s a clean, critterfree, floating campsite any place you drop the anchor. (Even in remote areas, suitable campsites can be hard to find.) Now I know that two people sleeping aboard a portagable boat sounds a tad preposterous, but it works. The four foot beam, and dead flat bottom give amazing “stiff as a church”( well, a chapel maybe) stability and with the boom tent/sail, she’s a lot roomier than most back packing tents.
The idea started when, as a high school kid, I rigged a dish towel (the basic tool of my Vermont summer camp job) on an inner tube and sailed down Lake Champlaign. Years later, after sailing lots of real” boats, I realized that none had given the intimate experience with wind and water that the inner tube had, and that that experience was the reason I was on the water in the first place. So, being an industrial designer, I set out to design a boat, which eventually became Moondance, that would come as close to the inner tube experience as possible, but sail well, and keep two people safe and dry. She was to be as small as possible and sailed reclining on a padded deck ( if you preferred ) with your head up on cushions just above the water where small waves would become events. And she was to be very beamy and flat bottomed, so you wouldn’t even think of capsizing. Although I wasn’t interested in speed, I was a little afraid that she might be a dog to sail. But she sailed just fine. After years of informal comparisons, she seems to have the
